


A New Life of Their Own

by Allekha



Category: The Branches - Radical Face (Album)
Genre: Canon Disabled Character, Gen, Happy Ending, Missing Persons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-06
Updated: 2015-01-06
Packaged: 2018-03-06 08:12:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3127418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Allekha/pseuds/Allekha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her daughter always came back. Until she didn't.</p>
<p>What happened after, and before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A New Life of Their Own

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Hannah](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hannah/gifts).



He said that she'd just run off again on one of her wild adventures. She'd be back by dinnertime, or next morning at the latest.

She went after her daughter. And after finding herself holding an empty box with her daughter nowhere to be found, sobbing, trembling, she prayed as hard as she could for a good half hour. Then she called the police.

She wasn't surprised, but she couldn't stop crying when the police sweep turned up nothing. Their neighbors – who gave their daughter odd looks and let her have her little treasures – came out of the woodwork to help search the forest and the beach. Relatives she hadn't spoken to all year called when they heard the news.

So sorry to hear, they said. I'm sure she'll be found safely, they said. I'm praying for you and her, they said.

~!~

Their daughter was never normal.

She didn't make friends in kindergarten. The teacher and aide said that she didn't seem to understand the other children, didn't like to take turns or go along with their plans, and after a while she gave up and played her own games in their midst. Sometimes the others would tag along for the length of one recess, before leaving her when they were herded back inside.

She did okay in school, with her best progress in art and music, and her teachers reported that she was the least disruptive student in any class. Quiet. Obedient, when she seemed to hear. She didn't interact with her peers very much after the first week though, didn't speak, didn't always pay attention. She would grow out of it, everyone said hopefully.

She rarely spoke from the time she was little, in fact, and it didn't always make sense when she did. She grew cold easily and preferred layers long into the spring. She didn't like to look people in the eye and she didn't eat with other people around and she didn't like a lot of foods.

She liked to go off on her own and play her imagination games. She always came back when it started getting dark.

Until she didn't.

~!~

The thing about having a missing child was that it didn't get better. The calls dropped off; the police reports grew thinner as none of their leads picked up. But the ache didn't go away, not ever. She thought about her daughter when she woke up in the morning, when she made breakfast, when she hung the laundry out, when she laid in bed trying to make herself fall asleep.

For the first few months, it brought them closer together again. She held her husband's head against her shoulder and pressed her eyes into his hair as he wet her shirt with his tears. They held hands when they walked to church on Sunday. Some nights they slept in the same bed, the first time in a decade.

And then it fell apart again: they argued worse than ever. He blamed her for encouraging their daughter in her wild imaginings. She asked why he'd never spent time with her, real time that might have bonded them together. He screamed that she should have done more to help her with her disability; she screamed that he hadn't loved her for years. They both went to bed that night with sore throats and she, at least, had another round of tears soaking her pillow.

At the first anniversary, the newspaper did another report on their daughter, speculating on her whereabouts. The police shrugged their shoulders, saying that it was like she had vanished into thin air. There were more calls. The hole in their lives didn't hurt any more than the previous day, and it didn't hurt any less the next.

A week later, both of them agreed they couldn't do this any more. He moved out that night. She didn't tell a lot of people, mostly because she didn't want the calls starting up again. She couldn't take much more sympathy.

~!~

The school didn't care enough to have a therapist look at her as long as she did well enough in her lessons, although teachers would sometimes go a little out of the way to help her a bit. They didn't mind if she wrote things down instead of speaking them. They made little comments next to the drawings she made on her tests, even when she didn't answer all the questions or her answers didn't follow any logic. 

They couldn't afford a therapist or the constant drives to go see one. But she did buy her daughter all the art supplies she could use, and if not the best quality, at least decent. Crayola, not RoseArt. Reams and reams of paper, markers, colored pencils – all of them would be used up, and the traces of her imagination were left scattered all over the house.

They dealt with it as best as they could. They learned to ignore the advice from relatives that held all the worth of snake oil. They borrowed every book the library system had on children anything like their own. They tried anything that seemed like it would work.

They let her keep food in her closet, her favorites, so she wouldn't have to eat in front of others. They let her stay in her room and draw when they had visitors. They let her run around and play with her dreams and didn't question what her nonsensical games meant. 

They waited patiently in the thrift store for hours while she decided what clothes she wanted. They didn't pressure her to speak when she looked frozen up. They did their best.

But it was hard. She still didn't speak. She didn't like to look people in the eye. She would drag out Christmas lights and dig up toys on the beach and sit silently for hours toying with some treasure or other that she had found.

They didn't know what was going on in that mind of hers, and little by little they started to give up on the hope that they ever would.

~!~

She kept the house and the phone number. She dug up all the photographs of her daughter that she could find and put them up in the hallway. Most of them had been taken unaware. She left the door closed and didn't dare go in even to dust, in fear that she would lose an afternoon to tears.

Instead she cleared out her husband's room and started a sewing business. She made gowns for new brides and smiled and said how beautiful they looked. She made dance outfits for children and tried not to measure them up against her own. She tailored clothes for acquaintances and still rose to look out the window every half hour. That habit never died.

The calls still came in, occasionally. A lot of people stopped talking with her as much, or stopped calling altogether. Once she slammed the phone down when her aunt suggested that it couldn't have been that hard, losing such a difficult child. Others couldn't seem to understand why her pain never diminished, as if she should have been used to it by now.

The worst part of the year was September, when all the children headed back to school. Her daughter had never, she thought, particularly liked school, but she'd headed off for each new school year quietly. Without complaint. Despite the stares when she lined up for the bus in her layers of scarves and her fingerless gloves, and the whispers that followed her everywhere.

_Mental retardation. Autism. Selective mutism. Strange. Weird. Creepy._

She would have even taken the whispers back to have her daughter again.

~!~

The questions pressed in on her all the time, day and night, often at random moments. Like when a customer came to pick something up and looked at all the photos in the hall and said that her daughter was cute. Like when she made a peanut butter sandwich, lacking the energy to make anything more complicated. Like when the weather was her daughter's favorite for exploring: misty in the morning, cloudy during the day, sunny in the afternoon and evening.

Why did she leave?

Where had she gone?

_How_ had she gone anywhere?

She dreamed of sunset-colored worlds where the stars danced and the wind sang. On waking she wondered if her daughter saw the world like that, or if she went seeking such a place.

She brought the box back eventually, after the police were done photographing it in case it gave them any clues. When she couldn't sleep, she went to the garage. There, she traced its swirls and its glued-down treasures, the spring that was going rusty. In the dim, she wondered at what magic her daughter had found to take her far away. Why she had felt the need to do so. What _she_ could have done to keep her here.

They'd done what they could. They'd tried. And it hadn't been enough. What had they missed?

When the guilt and questions got to be too much, she went back to her sewing, rather than her bed. The patterns took too much effort for any other thoughts to float up, and the sound of the machine on its fastest setting was too loud for her to hear even her own musings.

(She could never, ever allow herself to wonder: _is she coming back?_ )

~!~

One day, she let up on the sewing machine's pedal and went up to the window. That habit never died.

Outside, a girl was walking down the street, carrying a pillowcase and with layers of scarves wrapped around her.


End file.
